In the last 24 hours, I discovered a passion that is been asleep within me for over 60 years.

Before I was halfway through high school, I had decided that I wanted to just to experience the creativity of art. One of the new tools the artist had in 1950, was the airbrush. There was only one art store in El Paso that even had an airbrush and I saved my money and bought one. In order to use an airbrush, you had to have an air supply that was clean and the compressors that went with airbrush were very expensive. I knew that I had the technology to build one. I found an old water heater, about 20 gallon capacity, and some copper pipe and began to construct an air tank. For the compressor, I used an old refrigerator and removed the compressor.  I had air.

My studio was the back corner of the house and air supply came through the window.

The only ink that could be used, was water soluble black ink and very few colors at the time.

My knowledge of art was that I knew the masters, the subjects they painted and the media they worked with. I was in a new world. The only art that was emerging at the time was graffiti, and for the most part it was considered illegal because public buildings constituted a target that could land you in jail. Although I lived close to railroad yards it had not occurred to me that boxcars make a very good canvas, although they are sometimes not in the same place for very long, and once you've painted your picture there is no way to show it to anyone. Besides that, where was I going to plug in the compressor?

What a dilemma! I wanted to paint beautiful women, but at my age and my financial position, finding beautiful women to paint was a very tough problem.

Today I have Picasso, Salvador Dali  and DaVinci prints and various other fine art pieces in my house. Not that I am rich, I buy the prints, because I recognize and appreciate the artists. Although I continue to study art. I was not finding my medium and my opportunity, but I had an intense desire to participate in that community.

Not 24 hours ago, I rediscovered the passion and put all the pieces together the form of art that I had been searching for for over 60 years. It was called body art, and consisted not of painting pictures of women, but actually painting women with an airbrush, and then photographing those pictures and sharing them with the world by way of the Internet. Although I am past the age to launch a new career, I can still study and experience the best my age can provide.
My purpose for this this entry in my blog is to display the state-of-the-art and to point out one of the greatest artists of the 21st-century and compare them to the list of Picasso, Van Gogh,  Dégas, Toulouse-Lautrec and others.

My favorite artist is Craig Tracy and he practices his art in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The art on this page should have given it away. I should have known since I was attracted to Max factor makeup, used in the movie industry to correct facial colors and provide new dimension to faces for the film industry.

Pancake makeup, as it is called in the movie industry, is water-soluble, skin friendly and is meant for temporary use. This is unlike tattoo ink, which is embedded in the body and remains for a lifetime. This art form which consists of using skin friendly colors applied directly to the body of a human being must be applied in one day, preserved for a lifetime, and then destroyed 24 hours later. For this, photography was also a keen interest of mine.

This new interest in hard causes me to examine some of the reasons why I did not pursue it in the early part of my life. I was ill equipped to deal with some of the hangups that I had been indoctrinated with concerning the human body, morality, good and evil, and all those things came to the human form in which God had created us. My original subjects for my airbrush were beautiful legs of women. I could not buy enough paper and ink of the proper color to create nylon stockings and shapes of a woman's thighs, calves, ankles and feet. I could barely afford to buy the special paper required for air brush.

 It busied myself coming up with the right curve and confining ink to that outlines of the things I was painting. I was cutting templates to prevent the paint from being in the wrong place. I was trying to cover the area smoothly so that there were no lines and have a smooth gradation of color from one edge of the stocking to the next. I was also little embarrassed that my attention seemed to be on some of the beautiful aspects of a body and especially a woman's body. When my parents asked me about my art, I blushed. I could not share what I was experiencing with them, nor did I find any other peer at my age that understood any part of it.
Of course, I was exploring music and some of the music I was exploring came from that mysterious place in Louisiana, where characters were concocting jazz sounds that were not playable on radio listened to by decent people.

Staying inside the line is a great detriment to expressing yourself an art. Art, life, technology, all consist of constraints when learning the processes, but overcoming those constraints, and expressing the art is sometimes squelched before can fully develop.

Body art, on the other side often has no stopping points are constraints only edges of the canvas that gently roll away. Seeing galleries of this page, notice that there are very few sharp edges, but only jet gradations between one color and another. In some cases where there are distinct patterns the patterns will be provided by stencils. These stencils may be moved about to produce repeated patterns over the area, and are very seldom applied directly to the painted surface but only form a general outline.